Topic: Microsoft Rewards (Reward Points Thread)

@dmcc0 that's a good shout actually. I think I delved too far in to the PS Store during the eventually retracted notice period.

I know there's a few digital only Nintendo titles I want to get across 3DS and Wii U, the Pushmo series comes to mind. I think I will pick up a few more DS VC titles too. It's such a tough one. I want to hack the extra Wii U soon so I have a safety net in case any notable games fall through the cracks in my shopping spree. Just don't know which hack to use, it doesn't seem as straightforward as hacking the PSTV.

@ralphdibny Thankfully, Sony reversed their decision with the PS3 before I stocked up on gift cards so I didn't actually buy anything, but I guess it's only a matter of time before they do pull the plug.

I don't have a Wii U, but hacking the Wii was straightforward enough as far as I can remember, but I do recall that they use slightly different methods - I was going to hack my son's Wii U, but he sold it to pay for a Switch before I got around to it! To be honest though, I don't think I've actully used it that much since I did it.

Haha nice! At least you got a Switch and a ton of the Wii U games got ported to it. My friend actually hacked their Switch recently. It's tempting but I lean towards the notion of having an official console and an additional hacked console if at all possible. For example I have an unmodified Vita so I am quite happy to hack the PSTV.

I can't say I play the hacked PSTV that much either but it was so worth doing. Just for that random game every so often that I'll want to play on the big screen. Over the pandemic, when I was playing games "with" my partner (she just watched me play some of my favourite game series 😅), we played Uncharted Golden Abyss, Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops and Splinter Cell Essentials on the PSTV as part of larger playthroughs of their respective series'. It is great though because the camera on PSP games is normally awkwardly mapped to the D-Pad which can be assigned to the Right Stick on the PSTV so you actually get some semblance of a dual analog control scheme even if the inputs are digital instead of analog.

In the (far and distant) future, my plans for it include playing the Valkyria Chronicles series (2&3 are PSP games and I think 3 is Japanese only so it requires a fan translation patch if one exists), The Resistance series (which I think has a PSP or Vita iteration) and the Killzone series (which I think also has a PSP or Vita iteration).

I think where I'm stuck on the Wii U hack is that my main reason for doing it is to play DS games on the big screen, including ones that never saw a VC release. All reports of loading DS games onto the Wii U seem rather tedious and piecemeal instead of having the ability to load them all at once. Of course I will probably end up putting some GameCube games on there as well but yeah, bit stuck on the old and contradicting guides that I can find online.

I've been playing a bit Mario Kart DS on the Wii U VC and it is so good on a 55inch OLED TV. Unfortunately the VC emulation can be a bit limited in terms of no button mapping, it's insistence on using the gamepad only for DS games and it's screen orientations which don't account for every style of DS game available. It's great for things like Mario Kart and I'd assume even stuff like Metroid Prime Hunters but I think I'd struggle to use it for games that use the two screens as a shared gameplay space or portrait orientation games (where the gamepad maps the buttons weirdly to one side of the controller). So I am quite keen to do a hack which either unlocks more features on the VC emulator or uses a different emulator that has more customisable options.

@ralphdibny One of the benefits of being a "2 Switch family" is that I get to borrow all his games! He's a 'typical' Nintendo gamer in that he generally buys the (full price) 1st party stuff so I usually don't have to.

I'd usually only hack something once it's no longer supported to be honest, so no plans to hack the Switch yet - I'd probably do something wrong and end up either bricking it or getting my account banned or something 😂 I do vaguely recall buying a 'chipped' PS1 back in the day though and renting/copying games from the Blockbuster round the corner - I did own the likes of MGS, Tomb Raider, Crash etc, so must've just rented the smaller stuff as the only thing I actually remember playing a copy of was a Muppets Karting game! I've no idea what happened to it actually - probably didn't play it much after I bought a Dreamcast and I think my brother likely 'borrowed' it when he joined the Army.

@dmcc0 I probably wouldn't take a hacked device online to the official network anyway. It's why i'd always want to do it to a second console, so I kind of still have an official one with purchases/friends/trophies etc

Oh yeah, I remember the chipped PS1s! I remember going with my dad to the market to get mine chipped and the guy said he'd have to take it home to do because it was a later model (the dualshock model). I'm sure it would have been fine but we still didn't trust it so never did it.

I remember you could just buy bags of copied PS1 discs from that market. I think we did that disc swapping technique where you stick some blu tak in the back of the disc drive to keep it spinning and swap out a legitimate disc with a copy or import when it reaches different speeds. I read about the technique in a PlayStation magazine at some point

I don't think I actually played that many copies to be honest. I remember playing that banned game Thrill Kill that got leaked. Bought a copy of that down the market. Also an import copy of A Bugs Life. Good game actually but imports played in Black and White unless you had a SCART lead or something 😅

@ralphdibny Yeah, far too risky, although my son did upgrade to a Switch OLED and still has his original launch one lying around, so might look into it if I'm bored one weekend. I'm definitely not buying a second console just to hack though - my wife already gives me grief for having too much gaming stuff around the house already and she'd freak out if a duplicate console turned up 😅

@dmcc0 haha tell me about it, I only managed to swing the Wii U because I took some amiibos and some unopened Lego Dimensions packets to CEX to trade in! 😅

@Balta666 I'm not sure if you are posting in the right thread 😅, this is the MS Rewards thread!

@ralphdibny lool, my bad

Gamepass gets all the press for xbox but for me rewards its equally awesome not enough people talk about it. it paid for half my series X and a 3 year warranty 20 games and my gamepss ultimate.

it is the biggest bargain in gaming

@trev666 that only counts for people in the US and UK. I'm not from one of those countries and the rewards here aren't as stellar as those 2 countries get. I can get around 1500 points a month without spending a dime and that's it. That's only a little over 2 euros a month

@trev666 @Lavalera and my country we don't even have it... Rewards is in dire need of expansion.

@Balta666 agreed. Dunno from which country you are but are the prices also a lot higher when you buy a game than in the US? I'm from the Netherlands and here we pay 70 or 80 euros for new games. Which is more like 73 or 83 dollars with the current exchange rates and I'm sure for aussies it's even worse. Still think that's strange in current day situation but oh well

@Lavalera I am from Portugal so we have the same prices as yours. I don't buy new games anymore. For instance I am now looking at a copy of elden ring for 42€

@Balta666 it's also my plan to buy less new ones. The last few months I've been spending a lot on games, mostly new games, since I'm basically new to console gaming after being a pc mmorpg player for years. Since my backlog already is enormous and I have gamepass and the ps plus extra thing in a bit I don't many new games and wanna tone it down to like 3 games per year max.
But yeah I hope the rewarss will be expanded since even though I don't earn that many points I got a few gift cards which saved me some money on buying games.

It's not really an MS rewards thing but I'm thinking of just calling time on that month long play for an hour each day promo. It was ok while I was polishing off Yakuza but I'm playing Bioshock 2 on PS4 at the moment so I don't have time in my evenings to load up a game on Xbox for an hour and press buttons on the controller every time it decides to go to sleep.

I have never won anything off Xbox anyway. I've never won any Rewards sweepstakes and I've never won any of their Twitter giveaways and I've never got one of those £5 credits sent to me in my messages so I don't have much hope for winning anything from that play an hour a day without stopping promo.

I still go on there and do the bare minimum Rewards stuff though. I do the game pass quests, I do the "PC" Bing searches on Xbox, the weekly quests and hitting random store links for 5 points a pop. I'm not bothering with mobile search points and by extension the edge search points.

I'm on about 30K and a bit points at the moment since I splurged my 200K going toward my series X earlier in the year.

Rewards really is playing up at the moment play with friends on pc doesn't register and achieve more earn more nether

Just redeemed £60 of rewards points and got a new controller. Was gutted when I discovered you can't do design lab with rewards but, still got a limited edition controller.

Also I love rewards I've prob got about 300 quid worth of free stuff from doing it.

Quest completionist which is usually 1000 Microsoft rewards points is now only 500.

This follows on from the daily rewards about 7 months ago being reduced from 10 to 3 points for playing a game pass game everyday.

It also looks like the weekly 'play' games have been reduced from 25 points to 5. Lets build a zoo is only 5 points. And it's pushing some online mmo instead with some insane in game collection to get ms points.

Damn that's going to cost us about 870 points a month now if you use the xbox everyday

We have probably all noticed the app page is more focused on Ingame purchases, rather than the achievement stuff of old. Disappointing. Its still worth doing but it's not as lucrative with these changes.

@themcnoisy I’ve just noticed the Quest Completion reward points have been reduced to 500 from the usual 1000. The Black Desert task does offer 250 but there’s no way I’m grinding for that. I hope this doesn’t become a regular thing, as you’ve pointed out they’ve already reduced points for daily and weekly rewards. Some people earn these reward points to pay for their monthly Game Pass Ultimate subscription but at this rate they’ll have to just redeem £5 worth of reward points and use their bank card to pay the rest.